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NICE Actimize faced the challenge of providing top-notch actionable intelligence for financial institutions to detect fraud and alert executives to potential criminal activities. The company needed to customize reports to ensure financial institutions remained compliant with regulations. Their proprietary solution required continuous operation in the background to seek out suspicious activity over time and across multiple transactions. However, it struggled to keep up with the demands for complex conglomerations of disparate data. The company needed a scalable, integrated reporting and dashboard tool capable of reliably accessing multiple data sources and enabling users to visualize the information easily for faster and better decision-making.

Against a backdrop of increasing need for efficiency, Franklin American Mortgage Company’s (FAMC) business intelligence solution previously incurred significant development times, could not achieve required report formats, and stifled analytics sharing and reuse. They had relied on Crystal Reports, which instilled a model of various localized silos where users created their own versions of commonly needed reporting and data assets. After countless hours spent trying to replicate the precise format and layouts of government-mandated compliance forms, the mortgage giant was burdened by their existing toolsets and left in a situation where many reporting outputs required manual intervention before they reached a “ready-to-submit” state. Manually running and distributing reports was also a time-consuming task that the company sought to automate. FAMC needed to centralize data and reporting, and efficiently share insights throughout their organization.

KANA Software faced significant challenges with their existing reporting tool, which was not equipped to handle heavy data usage and lacked the flexibility required by their customers. The process of setting up and creating reports was cumbersome and inefficient, limiting the number and types of reports accessible to support agents. This resulted in agents often lacking a complete 360-degree view of customers, hindering their ability to fully engage with them. Additionally, the previous reporting tool was Windows-based, causing interoperability issues for several enterprise-class customers and leading to development delays due to incompatibility and workflow inefficiency. To address these issues, KANA sought a more robust and efficient embedded platform to enhance the quality and depth of customer information provided to agents.

Informatica faced the challenge of providing customers with the ability to report on archived data from any database. They needed to source and embed a third-party reporting application into existing applications and deliver self-service reporting to customers at every level of an enterprise. The complexity was heightened by the diverse user base across various industries, each with unique reporting needs. Traditional reporting methods were time-consuming and resource-intensive, creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

Brivo faced challenges in providing their customers with in-depth reporting options and the ability to visualize, analyze, and comprehend their data. Their customers needed to easily distinguish potential security risks and trends from normal activity and required more dynamic and interactive web-based reporting options. Additionally, with the increasing emphasis on physical security and cybersecurity, Brivo’s customers needed an efficient approach to quickly identify critical information, such as security breaches or other anomalies, without reviewing multiple video screens. This need was particularly important for larger enterprises with security teams that had to monitor greater volumes of people and physical locations.

With multiple applications combined with staff cuts and budget constraints Barry University needed a better way to aggregate data from multiple sources to create reports and dashboards for users across departments. Barry University is a private, Catholic university founded in 1940 located in Miami Shores, Florida and is one of the largest Catholic universities in the Southeast. The University offers more than 100 degree programs, from bachelors to doctorate, in a number of areas, including: business, social work, law, nursing, health sciences, education, and liberal arts programs. Consisting of six schools and two colleges, Barry University has more than 7,000 students, a campus of 54 buildings, a branch campus in Tallahassee, a law school in Orlando, and 50,000 alumni. Regina Lopez, Director of Database Services and Tracy Graham, Associate CIO University Business Solutions at Barry University have been using Entrinsik Informer for 10 years. They have over 4500 reports in production, pulling data from their Colleague® by Ellucian database. They are also using Business Objects to run more complex Registrar, Admissions and Financial reports. With staff cuts and budget constraints they no longer had the in-house Business Objects expertise needed to create and maintain those reports. In addition, with the implementation of Workday, the Admissions data was no longer maintained in Colleague but instead captured in Salesforce.com. They needed to aggregate data from these different sources to create reports and dashboards for users across departments. They needed to determine whether to upgrade their Business Objects instance or migrate to an alternative solution like SQL Reporting Solutions to meet their more complex reporting needs. After seeing a demonstration of the new Informer 5 at an Ellucian user conference, they decided to investigate whether the new version could meet their needs instead.

Before implementing Informer, Passaic County Community College was experiencing daily challenges trying to manage their data. Accessing important information on their Colleague® by Ellucian database using the native Query Builder tool was difficult, time consuming, and inefficient, leaving end users frustrated and IT staff overwhelmed. “The main challenge was the urgency of the user needs and unclear requirements,” said Hanumant Borate, Database Administrator at Passaic County Community College. “A lot of time had to be spent on developing and modifying user reports and queries.” Self-service reporting with Query Builder was impossible for non-technical users and IT staff who could use the tool found it inefficient and extremely limited. Users could only examine small amounts of data at one time, queries were difficult to customize and report outputs were challenging to modify. Along with spending a large amount of time fulfilling user requests for reports, IT staff also experienced challenges with data integrity and security, never knowing if data was accurate or secure in their database.

ClearPoint Credit Counseling Solutions, a national nonprofit credit counseling agency, faced significant challenges with their reporting capabilities. The organization relied on native reports in their SugarCRM application and submitted requests for new and customized reports through Jira. This process was cumbersome and time-consuming, involving multiple departments and people. The lack of self-service reporting capabilities meant that staff could not access the information they needed when they needed it. Additionally, ClearPoint had data in multiple locations that could not be accessed within one system, requiring manual report creation, a task that non-IT staff could rarely perform on their own. The premade reports in SugarCRM did not provide all the necessary reports and visualizations, leading to inefficiencies and resource drains.

Trivantis provides eLearning authoring software, talent management, and learning management systems to Global 2000 companies in over 125 countries, with products including Lectora e-Learning software and CourseMill learning management software. As an official OEM partner with Entrinsik, Trivantis embeds and white-labels Entrinsik Informer as CourseMill Advanced Reports. Before partnering with Entrinsik, reporting within their eLearning software solutions was limited. CourseMill offered users parameter-driven reports for end-users that could not be modified, and standard SQL reports that more technical users could manipulate. Users had to have a basic knowledge of SQL to use these pre-made reports, which most customers didn’t have. Trivantis customers wanted reports from their CourseMill data that were easier to create and manipulate but also more complex and visually appealing. Trivantis wanted to provide a more flexible, robust solution that offered users multiple ways to access, view, manipulate, and share their data. Without sufficient time or resources to develop their own internal reporting solution with the desired features and capabilities, Trivantis knew they needed to find another solution.

Before implementing Entrinsik Informer in 2010, Elgin Community College (ECC) faced significant limitations in their reporting capabilities. The college relied on Query Builder to access data within their Colleague® by Ellucian database, built on Rocket UniData, and Envision, a programming tool from Ellucian, to write custom reports and processes. Only two IT staff members and a few business analysts could write queries and respond to end-user requests. Users had to use a colon prompt function to access their Colleague database, which was a complicated and tedious process, especially for those without specific technical training. This process presented problems, such as the inability to retrieve or save commands and lack of data security. Additionally, user requests for reports had to be funneled through an analyst and then to IT staff, causing delays and dependency on IT intervention. The college needed a more effective reporting solution to support their staff's needs and reduce IT involvement.

Texas Title provides valuable insurance services with offices all over the country with its affiliate company. With unmatched title plant access covering over 90% of the population of the State of Texas and the ability to close transactions in 45 states, Texas Title is a true one-stop solution for all title insurance needs. To ensure that transactions are handled smoothly and professionally, Texas Title relies on accurate data to keep track of the numerous aspects of their business. Determining the financial state of business activity at the end of each month was a stressful process and they needed a better way to access and manage their data. Prior to using Informer, Texas Title was using canned reports provided by their title, settlement, and escrow software, RamQuest, and manually tracking their revenue and expenses with Work Books. Keith Hafner, President of Texas Title, realized the need for a more efficient and timely way to deal with reporting needs. “There was no ability to see who or what office was closing what and to ensure that remittances to the agency were accurate and/or timely,” said Hafner. Management needed a clear view of business performance, but found that their current methods were time consuming and ineffective. The canned reports weren’t customized to their requirements, and financial reporting was a slow and tedious process leading management to realize the urgent need of finding a better way to manage their business-crucial data.

Before implementing Entrinsik Informer, staff members at Atlantic Cape Community College (ACCC) were limited by the lack of reporting capabilities offered with their Colleague® by Ellucian system during their migration from a legacy system in 2009. Using a Multivalue database, Rocket UniData, ACCC needed a solution that met their reporting and data analysis requirements that was designed to work with Multivalue databases. IT staff were using Query Builder on a limited basis in order to create and run a small number of reports essential to the College and their implementation consultants, leaving end-users unable to create and run reports themselves thus requiring IT assistance whenever a specific report needed to be run. Douglas Hedges, Dean of Information Technology Services (ITS) at ACCC, realized that the College needed a reporting solution that was more flexible, functional, and easy to use with their relational and Multivalue databases. “Colleague by Ellucian as delivered offered little in the way of existing reports that met our needs,” said Hedges. “We knew early on that we needed to look for an alternative solution.” ACCC needed a reporting solution that would allow end-users to access, create, customize and run reports without assistance from IT. Users needed a true self-service solution that would give them access to the real-time data they needed, with full reporting capabilities and a user-friendly interface.

In the city of Columbia, Missouri, Public Safety Joint Communications (PSJC) serves as an integral link between the city’s various emergency, law enforcement, fire, and ambulance service agencies and the visitors and residents of Boone County. These agencies and departments rely on accurate data to maintain performance levels and quality assurance in order to continue providing services vital to public safety. PSJC maintains a variety of systems that contain data from which reporting is necessary. Prior to using Entrinsik Informer, reports were created using tools specific to each system, and many were solely for use by IT personnel. Reports could only be generated for each system independently, making it difficult to relate data between systems. This resulted in increased time requirements with the potential to limit decision-making perspective when analyzing data on similar but disparate systems. End users attempting to create reports themselves found the process complicated and inflexible, leading to frustration and wasted time. Many reports were needed on a regular basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.) but had to be manually generated and disseminated to those who needed the information. If up-to-date information was required or a report needed to be modified, there were very few people with the expertise to assist.

In the State of Connecticut’s Department of Social Services, the Bureau of Child Support Enforcement is the lead agency supporting the enforcement program along with players from multiple agencies and two branches of government. The Connecticut Child Support Enforcement System (CCSES) began as a Prime Information system and was migrated to Sun hardware and UniVerse in the mid-1990s. Extracting data from this system for reporting and data analysis was difficult and complicated; a pre-processor was executed to build a temporary file which was then listed for each report. Because the department’s application support and development is outsourced, modifying and customizing reports had to compete with other, more urgent needs for limited ‘enhancement’ dollars. Even with a few power users who were allowed to do selections against production data, ad hoc reporting was still an improvised, hit-or-miss process. Static reports were problematic for many departments, and varying reporting needs were almost impossible to satisfy with the current solution. For example, Judicial Branch employees handling court-based enforcement needed reports sorted differently than other stakeholders. It was a tedious process of wrapping text report files with HTML or distilling PDFs, and these were still static reports unable to be easily manipulated or revised.

North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) faced significant challenges with their existing reporting and dashboard solutions. The college, which serves over 3,700 degree-seeking students annually and thousands more through non-credit programs, relied heavily on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since migrating their Ellucian Colleague system to SQL in 2007. The Technology Services department was responsible for creating and deploying views of specific data from their Colleague database, but end-users had to teach themselves to use SSRS to run reports against these pre-configured views. This setup led to several issues: end-users could only access data in pre-configured views, any changes or additional data access required requests to Technology Services, and reports often ran slowly when too much data was added to pre-defined views. Additionally, NIACC used SAP Business Objects for dashboard creation, but the software's complexity limited its use to only four employees, leaving many dashboard requests unfulfilled.

Before implementing Entrinsik Informer, staff and faculty at Hampshire College were relying on Rocket wIntegrate’s native Query Builder for report generation. This system only allowed for daily operational reporting without the ability to perform in-depth analytics. Users found it awkward and challenging to share reports with others, and IT staff were often required to write or edit reports for users who felt uncomfortable using the complicated interface. This system also prevented users from being able to report simultaneously from multiple data sources, limiting access to only the school’s production database. Hampshire College needed a full BI & reporting solution that would be easy to use so that end-users could access the reports they needed without assistance from IT. Users also needed the ability to view more in-depth analytics in order to make better informed, important data-driven decisions within the College. Lastly, Hampshire needed to be able to report off of multiple databases at once using one simple tool.

AAAA World, a leading distributor of consumer electronics and appliances, faced significant challenges in accessing and analyzing data within their Rocket D3 database. The company relied heavily on a consultant to manually run reports, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Employees had to wait for authorized personnel to generate reports, leading to delays in obtaining critical data. The TCL command option was also complex and not user-friendly, further complicating the reporting process. AAAA World needed a more efficient, cost-effective solution to streamline their reporting and data analysis processes.

For the Oklahoma City Housing Authority (OCHA), who provides housing and rental assistance to low-income people and their families with over 7,000 dwelling units, accessing important data was often a frustrating, complicated task. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has various reporting guidelines for housing authorities that require a significant amount of data to ensure compliance. More urgently, HUD is beginning to require dashboards as a way of presenting this data and OCHA had no easy way of quickly and easily developing the necessary visualizations.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development, faced several challenges in their marketing and business development activities. They needed an effective way to coordinate business activities, track interest in the foundation, and follow-up on leads. The existing reporting module in SugarCRM Professional was underperforming, making it difficult to generate complex reports and visualizations. This hindered their ability to capture and leverage the right information to build key relationships and determine where to invest to maximize fundraising potential.

Entrinsik partner Wynne Systems is a global software company producing rental equipment software for the equipment industry and business intelligence tools for a large variety of sectors. Their product offering includes a powerhouse product, Axiom® ERP, based on the robust and reliable IBM i platform.\n\nThe Cat Rental Store is a subsidiary of Finning International Inc., the world’s largest Caterpillar equipment dealer. The Cat Rental Store is a full service rental organization, featuring a full line of mid-size and smaller Caterpillar machinery as well as a variety of other name brands and equipment. The business serves a diverse range of industrial markets and supports their customers with high quality Rental Equipment, Used Equipment Sales, New Equipment Sales, Safety Training Services, and Plant Shutdown Services & Asset Management Programs. The Cat Rental Store has become a leading rental service provider in Western Canada.\n\nThe team at The Cat Rental Store used a combination of different reporting tools and data sources including Axiom ERP, IBM Cognos, Showcase, AS400 Query, SQL, and SugarCRM with Excel in order to get the reporting results they needed. In many cases the reports were manually generated and then amalgamated by either importing or copying data into spreadsheet templates. The Cat Rental Store generated Axiom ERP reports, custom queries and Excel spreadsheets with most of their Key Performance Indicator (KPI) information, collected and reported on at month’s end, not in real time. Reports were primarily created, modified, and distributed either through members of the IT or Accounting departments. This reporting environment created multiple challenges: untimely access to reports, non-uniformity in data analysis, Excel skills/access restrictions, large file distribution, and end-user interpretation and training difficulties, among others.

The Raleigh Police Department serves over 400,000 residents of Raleigh, the capital city of North Carolina, and the department is internationally accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. Raleigh PD is continually looking for strategies that help prevent crime and identify solutions by analyzing and visualizing large amounts of data quickly and easily to make the best decisions possible to serve and protect the community. Prior to purchasing Informer, all reports needed by Raleigh PD such as monthly counts (e.g. incidents), offense by crime and others were generated by programs within their current records management system. However, within that system there were limited applications and reports available, according to Karen Whitlow, Systems Analyst at Raleigh PD. “If a report didn’t already exist we would have to, with considerable time and effort, write a program to generate a simple report”, says Whitlow. “Once a report was generated, it could then be modified by the IT department at Raleigh PD if it was generated by a program containing our code; however if the report was generated by a program not based on our code, it could not be modified internally but only by a change request to the company providing the program.” This convoluted process made extracting information from the database difficult, and writing one-off applications to create seemingly simple reports took considerable time and effort from the already overburdened technical staff.

Police Credit Union (PCU), a customer of Entrinsik’s Asia-Pacific Informer distributor Meier Business Systems (MBS), is one of the larger and more successful credit unions in Australia offering access to a wide range of products and services. Prior to implementing Informer, an award-winning reporting and analysis solution, PCU was relying on a single IT staff member with specialized skills to write basic reports in Pick programming language with each report averaging a day to write. In addition, their software vendor would charge approximately $7K per customized report plus the cost of storing the extra report since it was considered a modification. As a result, it was taking PCU significant amounts of time to write customized reports (since most were done without a program specification), and often the majority of new reports would eventually have to be rewritten. In addition, only one IT staff member had the skills necessary in proprietary report writing, so it was an operational risk to the business as well as being inefficient. “It was typical for the Executive team to expect turnaround of a week or more from report requisition until delivery,” said Mr. Trevor Savin, Support Analyst at PCU. PCU needed to remove the reliance on a single staff member for report generation so anyone would be able to quickly and easily generate ad-hoc reports as well as schedule operational, often mission-critical reports. “PCU is also going through a phase of ‘print less and view more’ and we needed a solution that would facilitate staff anywhere to view reports online,” said Savin.

Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) faced significant challenges with their existing reporting process. The IT department was primarily responsible for creating and delivering reports, which led to redundancy and inefficiency. Reports were stored in multiple locations, making it difficult to track and maintain them. Additionally, modifying existing reports to add or change fields was time-consuming, slowing down decision-making processes. The previous reporting solution lacked the necessary security features to extend access to the majority of users, creating a bottleneck in report generation and modification. CPCC needed a solution that would allow users to run or modify their own reports without overloading the IT department with requests.

Since 1976, R&R Insurance Services, Inc. has grown to be one of the largest independently owned insurance agencies in the Midwest. They represent top rated national and regional insurance carriers and are using Vertafore’s AMS360® agency management system.\n\nR&R had three main reasons for seeking out an application like Entrinsik Informer. First, they were struggling to extract data and/or capture specific data within their AMS360 database that was relevant in helping them make informed decisions on a timely basis. Second, they were looking for a tool that would allow them to create custom reports and save those parameters without having to always recreate the report from scratch. Finally, they needed a system with a delivery mechanism. “We needed a way to schedule reports and get the information into the hands of the users quickly and efficiently,” said Michael Franz, CFO at R&R Insurance Services.

J.W. Terrill needed to reduce the time spent on creating and distributing reports and then customizing them for individual managers and supervisors. The agency was using Vertafore’s Sagitta® agency management system and had been manually creating and distributing all recurring reports and using Excel to customize the reports and create user-specific reports. They would then manually distribute the reports via email attachments. Recurring reports were consuming an average of three days each month, and additional time was spent in other departments. The agency also faced difficulties finding a third-party solution available to Sagitta OnLine agencies, and Vertafore had no plans to upgrade the report scheduling capabilities within Sagitta. They were looking for a new reporting solution to free up valuable resources needed for other projects and ensure timely report generation and follow-ups.

Ruhl & Ruhl Insurance needed to streamline the process of generating production reports to obtain critical information for monthly management meetings. The primary challenge was comparing production year-to-year and month-to-month by individual producers. The existing process was time-consuming and inefficient, involving multiple reports and manual comparisons using Excel. This inefficiency led to delays in generating the necessary reports, which were crucial for making informed management decisions.

AutoAccelerator CRM, a subsidiary of Customer Focused Marketing (CFM), is an all-in-one CRM solution -- built using SugarCRM -- integrating all facets of automotive CRM into one comprehensive system. To enhance their offering, the team at AutoAccelerator CRM needed to integrate a powerful, flexible reporting solution. They spent thousands of dollars and many hours of development time trying to write a customized reporting solution and investigated other SugarCRM plug-ins with no success. The challenges were trying to develop a powerful and flexible enough tool that allowed some level of customization by the user. They had also worked really hard on their user interface and wanted a reporting tool with an interface that was clean and contemporary. Finally, they didn’t really have development resources they could dedicate to the project so they needed something that was pretty much plug-and-play. CFM wanted a reporting solution that would be simple to use and give users the ability to make report customizations like grouping and charting to avoid creating multiple reports that just displayed the same data in different formats.

End-users at Everett Housing Authority needed to quickly and securely access data, no matter where it resided in the organization, without burdening IT staff with multiple requests for ad-hoc reports. For over 60 years the Everett Housing Authority (EHA) has been committed to serving the housing needs of the people of Everett, Washington. Critical to supporting this commitment is providing staff across four departments with information that is up-to-the-minute and easily accessible in order to optimize decision making without burdening IT with numerous custom report requests. “Our users would often call on IT with custom reporting requests, which were a considerable cost for us since that meant IT had less time to handle other important projects,” says Paul Erickson, Computer Services Coordinator at Everett Housing Authority. “Providing easy-to-use self-service ad-hoc reporting for our users was critical.”

Duane Roth, IT Programmer/Analyst and the team at Southeast Community College require a monthly upload be processed for all retirement deposits for 700+ employees on the payroll. This report must be sent in a specific file format with a minimum of five records per employee configured with specific field lengths. Several years ago they were using a well-known report writer to create the multiple records required. The collection process took nearly one hour to format the data for all 700+ employees and send that output to an MS Excel file for further manipulations. The Excel file was then put into a COBOL program, and the pre-defined formatted output records were created for the upload. Each month the data collection time would increase as another month of data needed to be evaluated. 'Our initial run of several years ago went from a couple of minutes to almost an hour for data collection', says Roth.

Kyle Rima, Database Administrator at Westminster College researched reporting options for about a year and had finally given up, deciding to stay with colon prompt reporting. However, users still suffered as these reports lacked interactivity, were in a static format, and requests had to be made to IT each time a new report was needed. As a result, creating reports took up a lot of IT’s time. Alternate reporting solutions they tested were very expensive, extremely time consuming to setup, and not user friendly. In addition, like many schools, Westminster has a SQL database for the admissions office and a MultiValue database for the rest of campus and struggle with data integrity and integration issues between the two systems.